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Herman creator Jim Unger dies in his sleep

Jim Unger, the creator of the Herman cartoons, died in his sleep at his B.C. home Tuesday. He was 75. (FILE PHOTO)

One of Jim Unger's Herman cartoons.

By San GrewalUrban Affairs Reporter

Wed., May 30, 2012

His work was cut out and stuck to refrigerator and office doors around the world.

Jim Unger, the understated genius who pondered the banal and frustrating moments of everyday life — and turned them into daily laugh-out-loud comic strip rituals for millions of readers — died in his sleep at his B.C. home Tuesday. Unger, who left behind two daughters, was 75.

His dry-humoured character, Herman, would become the everyman for readers, who often threw out their daily paper after flipping to the only item that really mattered.

“I don’t know how many times I saw someone pick up the paper, go to Jim’s cartoon, then throw the rest of it in the garbage,” remembers Toronto Star editor Phil Bingley. “He was that good.”

That was when Unger penned a regular editorial cartoon for the Mississauga Times, where Bingley immediately saw something in the former London bobby, hired as an advertising page artist at the small paper in 1971.

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“We needed someone who could do both, and Jim said in the interview: ‘Sure, I can do that sort of stuff.’”

After Unger began doing the paper’s editorial cartoon, Bingley says, he was approached every week and asked what to write.

“I would give him some issue and he would come back with something about a guy being slapped by a woman over a perceived slight. It was hilarious.”

When it became obvious to Bingley and other colleagues that Unger’s talent deserved a much wider audience, he approached Canadian syndicates and newspapers, including the Star, but was turned down.

But in 1974 he sent two dozen panels to U.S.-based Universal Press Syndicate.

“They sent him a 10-year contract by return mail,” Bingley recalls.

Soon, Herman, the frumpy, sardonic character who muttered one-line retorts about the absurdities of everyday life, was being read in more than 500 newspapers around the world.

Success didn’t change him, says David Culham, a former Mississauga councillor and Unger’s neighbour for 10 years. “He was taken aback by his sudden success, but it didn’t change him.”

Unger brought his mother, father and brother over from England and they all moved to Ottawa, where they lived together. Unger collaborated with his brother on his work as Herman became one of the most popular comics in the world. It was one of the first to be printed in colour by the London Sunday Mail, which had a circulation of six million. Books anthologizing his Herman comics became best sellers.

To a generation who never knew him, he could be called the Seinfeld of an earlier time, a comic mind who didn’t really write about anything — but boy, was it funny.

“He would take the funny side of the down side. People loved it,” Culham remembers. “It was a warm humour. Jim was reflected in the comic.”

Unger eventually moved from Ottawa to the Bahamas in the early ’80s. After winning the prestigious National Cartoonist Society Newspaper Panel Cartoon award in 1982 and 1987, he stopped creating Herman in 1992, to the disappointment of millions of fans around the world.

“I think he was just burned out,” says Bingley, who remained in touch.

Unger restarted his career in 1997, but he never fully recovered after the death of his brother, who Bingley says was the inspiration for much of Unger’s work.

“He was a really good guy. Laid back,” Bingley recalls. “He usually wrote about nothing, just a slice of everyday life.”

Refrigerator doors will never be quite as funny.

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